For the past ten years, Westminster Christian School senior Rebekah Raffalski has been involved in Feed Miami, a food pantry that was started by her sister and adopted by her whole family in 2009.
Raffalski says her sister was in elementary school when she heard a speaker say that people don’t have to go outside the country to help feed the hungry, that there are plenty of hungry people right here at home.
So Raffalski’s sister and her friends started Feed Miami based at Christ Journey Church. For seven years they distributed food directly to 200 families a week. Recently, Feed Miami switched to solely a point of collection and they send all the food to other grassroots community pantries for distribution.
“What I did then, was being the little helping hand,” Raffalski says. “I didn’t have a leadership position. Now that I’m older, it gives me the opportunity to take more of a lead.”
She’s been able to involve her school community in the Feed Miami project.
“In my sophomore year I was on the Student Council and I was able to bring Feed Miami to the school,” she says. “We were able to bring 150 bags from my grade alone. Now I am able to contribute in a way that I couldn’t when I was younger.”
Westminster students also contributed non-perishable goods last school year and will do so again in the spring.
Raffalski and her family are still heavily involved in the planning and organization of the food pantry.
“We also do collections around our neighborhood,” she says. “We will go around and drop off the Feed Miami bags. And when we go to pick up, half of the houses will have a full bag on their doorsteps. We do that twice a year.”
Raffalski says they see increases in those in need when things happen with the economy.
Or when people are dropped from the food stamp rolls because of budget cuts.
“I think we definitely get more families who need when things like this happen,” she says.
“We see fluctuations, especially at times like that.”
At school, Raffalski is a member of the choir. She spends much of her free time practicing and singing with the choir. The choir has two big concerts each year, the Christmas concert and Dinner Theater at the end of the year.
She sings alto in the choir and in the Honor Girls’ Ensemble. The ensemble will soon participate in the solo and ensemble competition sponsored by the Florida Music Education Association.
One summer she volunteered as a mentor at a choir camp at the Old Cutler Presbyterian Church.
Raffalski also dances five hours a week at the Jill Mallory Studio. She also teaches on the weekend.
“I teach two classes for younger kids – Creative Movement for kids 2-4 and a pre-ballet class for ages 4-5,” she says.
She’s the service coordinator for the National Honor Society at Westminster. She’s also a member of the Tri-M, the music honor society, the National English Honor Society, the National Science Honor Society, Ro Kappa, the social science honor society, Mu Alpha Theta, the math honor society and the Foreign Language Honor Society.
Raffalski plans to major in music therapy and so far, has been accepted and been offered scholarships to Belmont University, Appalachian State University, Florida Gulf Coast University for their music therapy programs, and Florida International University. She’s waiting to hear from FSU (they have the #3 Music Therapy program in the nation), University of Florida and the University of Central Florida.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
